Less Overhead with CA PPM

13-06-2018

Pressure on organizations to deliver products and services faster using less people is a constant challenge for lots of organisations. Agile has provided us with a great method for dealing with this ever increasing pressure and fast paced conditions. However, transitioning your organization into an Agile operation is challenging and not implemented overnight. Tools like CA PPM offer some great quick wins enabling you to operate with less overhead and speed up administrative processes.

By Roy Scholte

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First things first. Start by keeping track of your demand pipeline, project portfolio and resource capacity in one single tool. This will drastically reduce the time consuming task of maintaining a jungle of Excels to roll up and combine data. Harmonizing your organizations’ project management processes for data administration enables you to create some great overviews. This provides transparency and allows faster analysis of progress making it easier to identify points of interest without having to go through tons of data. So far nothing new…

Unfortunately, the group of people requested to work and administrate in a certain fashion is larger than the group of managers reaping the benefits from this effort. Often the need to work in a similar way is not properly introduced and resistance is often ignored and not properly managed. CA PPM has great workflow functionalities that take away lots of the tedious and repetitive tasks responsible for resistance. Using workflow automation in CA PPM is therefore interesting for tons of organizations. This functionality can be tailored to your own processes and will reduce time and effort for both the resources in execution as well as for management functions.

Workflows are designed to automate administrative steps based on various variables. Some examples are:

Ideas are automatically send to the correct stakeholders for approval. This will automatically create a project. In case stakeholders do not respond to the first request, they will receive a reminder.

When marking the Project End milestone ‘completed’, the system will close the project for you by setting the project status to ‘completed’ and close the project for time entry. A message is send tov all stakeholders involved to inform them.

Projects for which no updates are done or effort is booked to will trigger an email to the PMO for validation with the Project Manager. Alternatively, projects are closed automatically. No longer need for a periodic manual validation to clean up your overviews.

These are some examples which normally require human time and effort. This time can now be spent on more value adding activities. For example, as a Project Manager you can use CA PPM to get information on the project progress and get triggered when execution isn’t going as planned, instead of pleasing management with information which doesn’t help you.